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text and music by Patrick Cardy,

directed by Alon Nashman

Theaturtle, Young Centre, Toronto

December 4-15, 2007

Snow Queen, by Canadian composer Patrick Cardy (1953-2005), is a work for string quartet and narrator based on Hans Christian Andersen’s 1845 fairy tale of the same name.  Cardy’s music that depicts atmosphere, emotion and natural phenomena in such an effective, modernist idiom that the 55-minute piece would work very well on its own.  Alon Nashman’s company Theaturtle expands the piece’s theatrical side and in so doing makes it more accessible to a wider audience.

In the story two children, the boy Kay and the girl Gerda, are separated when the Snow Queen, a rather more demonic figure than our Jack Frost, takes a fancy to Kay and carries him away to her palace in the North.  Gerda then goes on a quest to find him and to learn how to remove the sliver of ice in his heart that makes him oblivious to the world.  The original tale is a dark parable about growing up and leaving the innocent stasis of childhood behind.  Cardy’s adaptation makes it much more an adventure tale about good versus evil.

Nashman himself is the genial narrator who easily draws us into the story where he plays about a dozen characters from humans young and old to, most humorously, talking crows, reindeer and pigeons.  The one character he does not impersonate is the Snow Queen herself who is played dancer Kate Alton in silent, menacing, agitated movement choreographed by Claudia Moore.  As director, Nashman places the Tokai String Quartet on stage and has them on occasion react to events in the story.  At one point violist Yosef Tamir-Smirnoff rises from his seat, playing all the while, to confront Nashman’s Gerda as the rushing stream she interrogates. 

Enhancing the verbal and musical aspects of the piece is Andrea Lundy’s atmospheric lighting and her constant video montage of abstract and natural images projected on a screen at the back that never overwhelms the onstage action.  This is an example of multimedia storytelling at its most sensitive and thoughtful.  Through Nashman’s warm-hearted narration, Cardy’s expressive music, Moore’s choreography and Lundy’s images, it held the audience of adults and children rapt in Anderson’s magical world where hope and love can dispel the icy darkness.           

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-12.-06.

Photo: Alon Nashman, Kate Alton and the Tokai String Quartet.